"Let
us run with patience the race that is set before us,
looking unto Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith"
(Hebrews 12:3).

"Know ye not that they which run in a race run
all, but one receiveth the prize? Even so run, that ye
may attain" (1 Corinthians 9:24).

"Ye were running well; who did hinder you...?"
(Galatians 5:7).

"Let us run". It is not so much the running or
the race that is in view but the goal, the prize. What is
the objective of our running? Ideas about this vary
greatly, and much evangelism limits it to the fact of
being forgiven and going to heaven. When, however, we
come to the New Testament, which is our final authority
on the matter, we find that although blessings and heaven
and glory are included, the real objective is a Person.
The prize turns out to be a person, and that person, the
Lord Jesus Christ. At this point in the letter to the
Hebrews we are faced with a summing up and an
exhortation, but it is clear that we must go back to the
beginning of this marvellous document if we are to
appreciate the force of its appeal.

The beginning of this epistle gives us one of the two or
three classical presentations of the person of the Lord
Jesus. I feel sure that if Paul did not actually write
it, the writer was one of Paul's school, notably so in
his apprehension of the matchless greatness of Christ.
The first five verses provide us with a superlatively
beautiful presentation of God's Son. It is to this Son -
Jesus - that we are to look as we run. He is the goal: He
is the prize. The letter has as its supreme object the
setting forth of Divine fullness and finality in God's
Son, presented to faith for faith's apprehension and
appropriation. Fullness in Christ - the gathering up of
all into Him. Finality in Christ - the completion and
realisation of all in Him. It goes on to consider in
greater detail what He is and what He has done, His
manifold capacity and ministry as God's Son, turning then
to an exhortation that we should keep this well in view
and pursue our race with fullness and finality in Christ
as our objective. Our lifetime will not be sufficient for
us to attain to this: eternity will be required for us to
discover what fullness really is.

If the goal and prize is Christ then the race will
resolve itself into overcoming everything that is not
Christ. The Christian life is a course, and a very
strenuous course, calling for our utmost concentration,
consecration and abandon. After all, progress can never
be made unless there is something to work against, and
strange as it may seem, friction seems almost essential
to progress. One cannot run on ice, and one can only make
slow and unsatisfactory progress on deep sand. There must
be something against which one can press and push,
something that provides resistance and which has to be
resisted and overcome. So our race is a matter of
overcoming, and supremely of overcoming the natural by
the spiritual. Our three texts will give us three areas
in which such an overcoming is called for in the
Christian life. We find three contrasts.

(1) Natural Intellect or the Mind of the
Spirit.

We begin with Paul's allusion to the Christian race in
his letter to the Corinthians. He told them to run and
later added: "So I run" (1 Corinthians 9:26).
We do not have to look far to discover what you had to
run against if you lived among those Corinthians. The
letter begins with the complete contrast between the
spiritual man and the natural man, showing that in this
race the spiritual man has to run against the natural,
and defeat him. We must be careful to note that it is not
a question of overcoming the natural man by the natural
man - that is a hopeless endeavour. No, the spiritual man
is the new creation man, born of the Spirit and now the
deepest inner reality of the Christian. The fact is that
within the sphere of a Christian's being there is the
natural man, who always hinders God's purposes, and the
'hidden man of the heart' who is governed by the mind of
the Spirit. And the attaining of the prize is the result
of the progress and growth of what is of Christ in the
life and the leaving behind, often by conflict, of that
which is not Christ.

Most of this letter is an exhibition of how the natural
mind behaves in the things of God. Christian fellowship,
even the Lord's Table and many other important features
of the spiritual life were confused and muddled because
the Corinthians were being governed by their own natural
way of thinking. Our natural mind is a great obstacle in
the race which we are running, cropping up all the time
with its complexes, its arguments, its interests and its
methods. When the Corinthians were brought into the
Church they left behind their obvious sins but they
carried over into their new realm the old, natural ways
of thinking and reasoning which belonged to the world and
not to the Spirit of God. But the apostle remonstrated
with them: "But we have the mind of Christ" (1
Corinthians 2:16), so urging them to allow the cross to
be planted between the natural mind and the spiritual. We
shall only come to the fullness of Christ as we leave
behind the mind of the natural man and move on more and
more in the progress of the mind of Christ. On
everything; every judgment, every conclusion, every
analysis, every appraisal; we must ask the Lord: 'Is that
Your mind, Lord, or is it mine? We may sometimes feel
that we have the strongest ground for taking up a certain
attitude or coming to a certain conclusion; we may feel
that we have all the evidence and so are convinced; and
yet we may be wrong.

The man who wrote the letter to the Corinthians knew from
deep and bitter experience that this was the case.
"I verily thought... that I ought to do many things
contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth" he said
(Acts 26:9). There was no man who had stronger
convictions as to the rightness of his course than Saul
of Tarsus. The great revolution which took place in him
when he came to Christ was that he had to say: 'I have
been all wrong in my fundamental way of thinking'. After
that confession he made good headway in the race because
he was always ready to subject his thinking to the
jurisdiction of his crucified Lord. This is the way of
spiritual progress. We shall not get very far while we
hold to our own opinions and our own conclusions, even
though we may have the support of others; we have to
learn to conquer our natural mind by submission to the
mind of Christ. This is most important if we are
concerned about spiritual progress. And spiritual
progress is the increase of Christ - there is no other.

(2) Natural Emotions or the Love of Christ.

Paul wrote to the Galatians: "Ye were running well:
what did hinder...?" Something had broken in and
interrupted their running in the spiritual race. This was
extremely serious and disturbed Paul to the depths of his
being. It seems that in the case of the Galatians it was
again the natural man, but this time in the realm of
natural emotions. They seem to have been of that
temperamental constitution which corresponds to Christ's
words in the parable about seed falling into shallow
soil. The seed was received quickly and earnestly, but
did not go on to produce a harvest. There are some people
who make an enthusiastic start in this way and make quite
a stir about it, but then do not go steadily on. These
Galatians were like that; they made a tremendous
response; they loudly protested their devotion; and then
they were very quick to drop out of the race. Why?
Because they lived on their emotions, on their feelings,
and these were changeable. This may well be a matter of
temperament, but in fact something of such a
characteristic can be found in most of us. We respond to
an appeal, come under the power of a great emotion, and
then slack off. In the words of the Lord Jesus:
"When tribulation or persecution ariseth... he is
offended" (Matthew 13:21).

Clearly, then, if you and I are going to persevere to the
end we must have a greater power than that of our natural
emotional life. The only hope is that it may be true of
us, as of Paul: "The love of Christ
constraineth" (2 Corinthians 5:14). There is all the
difference between the natural and the spiritual in this
matter of the energy of love. This word translated
'constraineth' is the same one used over the arrest of
Jesus when it says: "the men that HELD
Jesus" (Luke 22:63). They took a purchase on Him;
they were not going to let Him escape; He was a prize,
and they expected a reward for arresting Him. So it is
that the love of Christ should hold or grip us,
conquering our natural emotions by the mighty power of
the Spirit. Our feelings come and go. They may be strong
at times but they can also grow very weak. If we do not
know something of the mighty grip of Christ's love, we
will never go right through to the end of this strenuous
race. After all it is the love of Christ which makes for
the fullness of Christ. If we finally come to that
fullness it can only be by the constraint and holding
power of His love. "Ye were running well: who did
hinder you?" The answer is, You ran in the strength
of your own emotions, you ran as your enthusiastic
response to God's call because it affected your feelings
for the time. The letter to the Galatians is devoted to
emphasising the place of the Holy Spirit in the life of
the believer, for He alone can supply the necessary
energy of love for us to go on running well.

(3) The Natural Will or the Will of God.

Our third text is taken from the letter to the Hebrews
and is in the form of an exhortation: "Let us
run...". A comparison is made with Israel in the
wilderness, as being an example of those who set out but
who never finished the race. What was the matter with
them? There is a reference which perhaps touches the
secret core of their failure: "A generation that set
not their heart aright, and whose spirit was not
steadfast with God" (Psalm 78:8). This seems to
indicate a breakdown in the matter of the will. It is
true that the Hebrews to whom the letter was addressed
may have been stumbled by the natural mind and natural
emotions, but the main point of failure seems to have
been - like Israel of old - in the realm of the will.
Whether this natural will is regarded as weak or strong,
it has a treacherous effect on spiritual life. There can
only be real progress as this natural will is set aside
in favour of the will of God. It was on this basis that
the great Author of our faith set out on His race:
"I am come... to do thy will, O God" (Hebrews
10:7). What a battle He had to remain true to the will of
God! Even with Him there was that which had to be brought
under or set aside, and His was a perfect nature. Our
natures are far from perfect, so clearly we shall need to
be conquered by the will of God if we are to make
progress in the race.

We should remember that the opportunity to know this
all-embracing fullness of Christ only comes to us because
of His infinite capacity for letting go. But for that He
would never have come to us at all. But for that He would
never have put up with life here on earth for one single
day. The story of the laying aside of His glory, the
emptying of Himself, His humiliation, His death on the
cross, would never have been written if it had not been
that He was able at all points to let go and accept the
will of God. "Wherefore... God highly exalted him,
and gave unto him..." (Philippians 2:9). God gives
when we let go.